Saturday was going to be the official opening ceremony for the Gordon and Simka Allen Center for Children with Special Needs. Wyatt was going to cut the ribbon, and he was very excited. He’d been practicing all week with a very big pair of scissors.
The center had a sensory gym, multiple therapy rooms, and a state-of-the-art PT gym, as well as an innovative program that would bring in graduate students from nearby universities to perform the kind of research that was difficult to do in a clinical setting. It wasn’t a clinical setting, it was a school setting—it was connected to the Beekman public school by a winding, glass-enclosed walkway that took advantage of the view.
They’d even gotten a small school farm as part of the deal, the old Jenkins place, just out past the soccer field. The farm had been in the Jenkins family for over a hundred and fifty years, but it turned out the current generation was happy to sell it to the school, at a fair price, for the good of the community. The school farm would offer therapeutic horseback riding, as well as after-school programs in animal husbandry and organic gardening, permaculture and wilderness-survival skills, as a way for the neurotypical kids to interact meaningfully with the special-needs children in a structured yet nonacademic environment.
How it had happened was this.
Susan Howard had gotten wind of Gordon Allen’s attorney’s proposal to Owen and Lucy—the “whatever you want,” the blank check—and Susan was not one to let such an opportunity go to waste. She was in the middle of her own divorce, Susan was, but the strange thing about her split with Rowan was that their shared custody arrangement left her with gobs of free time. When she realized that Owen and Lucy were too wrapped up in their own stuff to think about it clearly, she immediately grabbed the reins. She unleashed the full power of the Mommies of Beekman, gathering them over drinks, thinking about what made the most sense given who Owen and Lucy were, what Wyatt would benefit from, what kind of legacy they might want to leave, and what the community could use the most. First, they dreamed together. Then they narrowed it down—to their credit, the ladies nixed a lot of one another’s pet ideas: the new auditorium, the state-of-the-art science lab, the indoor pool, the Maya Lin art installation—and then they did the research, they consulted specialists, they ran the numbers. Finally, they presented a plan to Owen and Lucy (separately, Susan had decided, after conferring with Sunny Bang) and, when they got their respective stamps of approval, they brought the whole thing before Gordon Allen and his attorneys. Claire had done the PowerPoint, Susan the artist renderings, and Sunny Bang the budget. The women in this town could take over the world, their husbands all thought as they sat on the sidelines, watching. Thank goodness they’re happy to raise our kids.
The whole thing was a spectacular boondoggle in the end, but Gordon Allen didn’t mind. All he asked for was that Dirk, his bee guy, be allowed to build a house on the farm property with zero interference from the town zoning board and that he be employed in perpetuity to develop whatever kind of cockamamie projects he wanted to do with the kids. (“If you want to build your house out of old tires and donkey dung, you can do it,” Gordon said to Dirk as he watched one of his Titleist V1xs plop into the mighty Hudson River. “If you want to teach a class on how to make a tractor run on algae and old French-fry oil, go right ahead.”)
All of it, the whole thing, was generously, perpetually endowed. With zero tax dollars involved.
Thank you, Fat Black.
Owen walked up the driveway, reading the letter as he went while he listened to Wyatt with half of one ear, the way a parent who spends a lot of time with his kid listens when the kid is talking about nothing much in particular. What was happening at school, who has a crush on who, what happened at recess, could he go camping with Brannon and Brannon’s dad, were they going to go to Maine again in the summer. Sometimes the reality of Wyatt was a shock to Owen, but lately, more often than not, it was like this: It was no longer extraordinary for Wyatt to be just about ordinary. Not totally, not by any means—but just about. He was a quirky, unusual, challenging kid. He was an amazing, unique, wonderful kid.
“Who’s that from?” asked Wyatt.
“What?” said Owen. He was lost, gone, deep in the letter.
“Who’s that mail from?”
“Oh, this?” said Owen. “It’s from an old friend.”
*
Lucy was upstairs, looking out the window, watching Owen and Wyatt walk up the driveway.
Lucy had moved back home a few months ago. Or, rather, she and Owen had both moved back home, together. It turned out that Wyatt couldn’t handle the shuttling-back-and-forth part of Lucy’s original exit plan, and so Lucy and Owen each moved in and out of the house every few days while Wyatt stayed put. Owen lived in the Callahans’ luxurious guesthouse when he wasn’t at the house, and Lucy split her time away between Ben’s place and the spare futon in Sunny Bang’s dank basement.
Sunny Bang was completely beside herself over the whole situation. She took the blame herself, too much of it, surely, and she did everything she could to make things right, even when Lucy was swooning around like a love-struck teenager. Basically, Sunny Bang went to work. She made a few phone calls. She invited her sister up to Beekman for the weekend, poured tequila down her throat, and got her talking. Sunny collected as many unsavory tidbits about Ben as she possibly could—stuff from as far back as college, ugly details about his divorce—and she held on to them until the first hot heat of passion and escape and fantasy had begun to burn itself out of Lucy’s system. And then? And then she oh so casually dropped them in Lucy’s path, like ancient Asian coins or tiny hardened turds, whenever she sensed they would have the most impact.
“Ben cheated on Deborah during her residency, but she always said it wasn’t really his fault,” Sunny said to Lucy one night while they were cooking dinner. “She was pretty much gone all the time. They worked it out, though. Stayed together for eight more years.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Lucy.
“To show that people can work things out,” said Sunny. “Why else would I be telling you this?”
Victoria had claimed over drinks that rainy afternoon in Brooklyn that it took three years for something like this to fizzle out, but for Lucy it took less than half of that. There was a good six months of, well, bliss—there was no other word for it, and Lucy would not call it something else, it was bliss, falling in love with a new person, no matter how old you are or how complicated things were, falling in love is a thing like no other, and the fact that Lucy had fallen just as deeply and completely in love with Owen all those years earlier did nothing to detract from that fact. So, six months of bliss, five months of pretty horrible, and then four months of date nights and long walks and counseling twice a week with Owen.
“This is really fucked up,” Lucy said to Owen when they met in the therapist’s waiting room the first time.
“Yeah,” said Owen.